Rough Passage to London: A Sea Captain's Tale (3 page)

With the wind picking up and the choppy seas splashing on the deck, the captain could see he was shorthanded. He only had two sailors and a cook on board. The winds were piping up sharply now. The headsails were thrashing about wildly, the lines all tangled together. The two men on the foredeck, inexperienced and dim-witted, were having a hard time wrestling with the halyards. Something must have gotten snagged. With no one else available, he turned to Morgan and looked down at him with a hawkish stare.

“Can you steer, son?”

Morgan nodded, gulping slightly. He was already feeling a little uncertain about what he was doing.

“That’s good, ’cause we’re headed into a blow,” said the captain as he stroked his thinning whiskers. “You just hold the tiller on this course and don’t let go.”

Captain Foster pointed at the black thunderclouds moving in from the west, indicating with his other hand the course he wanted Ely to steer. He handed the tiller over to Morgan and clambered out on top of the cabin house to help two other sailors trying to lower the flapping main gaff topsail. Morgan grabbed the tiller, his fingers wrapping around a well-worn, twisted, rope-covered grip. At first, he was thrilled that he was steering a ship, but then he began to be frightened. He couldn’t believe how much the four-foot-long tiller pulled at his arms. It was like trying to rein in a team of horses on the run. He braced himself with his feet against a wooden block on the deck, and pulled with all his might. Like most farm boys, the only boats he was familiar with were scows, small gaff-rigged sloops, and rowing skiffs. For that matter, he had never been in rough weather before, and as the ship began to pitch and heave, a strange feeling started to come over him.

The seas had started to build and the water was swashing over the decks. He was feeling dizzy and suddenly sick to his stomach. His head was spinning. He’d never been sick like this before. The ship was heeled over at an alarming angle, and pretty soon Ely let go of the tiller as he threw his upper body over the side in a reckless effort to rid himself of this sudden misery. It felt like the whole upper portion of his body was turning inside out. The acrid taste of bile filled his mouth. He paused for breath, and then the whole paralyzing process began all over again.

Free of a steadying hand at the tiller, the schooner swung into the wind, sails flapping wildly, thrashing about, the masts and rigging shaking and trembling. Ely was too far gone to even care, and with no one to tend it, the tiller now swung wildly back and forth, causing the boat to lose momentum. The captain rushed back to take the helm even as the schooner now swung through the wind onto a different tack and headed for the dangerous Long Island shoals. As he passed the prostrate form of the boy he’d left in command of his ship, he landed a kick in Ely’s backside and cursed him loudly.

“Hoist up the centerboard!” yelled the captain to one of the other men, panicked that his heavily loaded ship would run aground with a small fortune of cargo lost. One of the sailors down below in the cabin frantically pulled on the tackle to lift the centerboard. The captain looked over the side and cursed some more as he realized how shallow the water was. The boat scraped bottom, the bow leaping upward and then crashing down again. The next instant waves lifted up the stern, propelling the boat forward, and then with a fearful thud she struck bottom again. The bow was lifted up by waves, once again falling and scraping the bottom. By this time, the storm had struck with high winds and pelting rain. Waves hit the boat broadside and water started filling the cabin. The flashes of lightning and the roaring of the wind only made Morgan feel more like he was facing the end of the world.

Fortunately, the schooner soon plowed and scraped through the narrow Long Island shoals, making its way safely into deep water. The crew immediately set about to pump and bail, and by the early afternoon, the water was out of the hold. That night they threw the anchor down just off Throgs Neck at a pretty little anchorage in full view of an old farmhouse. After a pannikin of rum and the assurance that his cargo was safe, the captain soon regained his composure, and turned his attention to his quiet, sickly passenger.

“Have you ever been to sea before?” he asked with a knowing smile on his face as he gave each member of the crew a stiff glass of rum.

Morgan didn’t say anything. The captain handed him a plate of hard sea bread and salty codfish. Morgan’s face turned green as he felt he would have to vomit again. He turned away and looked down at his feet.

“Guess I know the answer to that,” the captain said. “We already guessed that you were a runaway. Might as well tell us your true story.”

Captain Foster looked over at the leering faces of the two sailors and the cook, then filled Morgan’s glass with a generous shot of rum. He’d come across many runaway boys in his thirty years at sea. “Rackety youngsters sowing a considerable crop of wild oats” was what he called them. He thought most of them were no better than chicken thieves and liars.

“Tell us all about yourself, lad. That story your brother told about you going to visit your widowed aunt is nothing but a bunch of palaver. Don’t bother telling us that.”

The only light came from a hanging lantern overhead. It shone directly in Ely’s eyes and made him feel weak and vulnerable. To try to appear like one of the crew, he took a sip of the rum and immediately regretted it. He made a face but swallowed it anyway. There was no point in trying to keep a secret. First he told them about his two older brothers, the dream they shared of going to sea, the special bond he’d had with Abraham, and how the letter they’d received had devastated his family.

Ely took another sip of rum and felt the alcohol burn the insides of his throat. He told the captain and his crew how he had given up his dream of shipping out to sea. How he’d resigned himself to a life on the farm, but then he’d run into an old sailor down at the docks in Essex who had surprising news about his brother Abraham. When he heard this man’s story it changed everything.

Morgan took another sip and began his story.

“His name was William Marshall. I thought he was just a drunken sailor looking for a free tot of rum. He introduced himself, and explained he was in a boarding house now waiting for a new Griswold ship to come off the yards. He was one of them Maine boys from the Penobscot, a little place called Camden where there’s not much of anything, just a few houses scattered about where the mountains meet the sea.”

“Get to the point, boy,” shouted Captain Foster, picking up the rum bottle and pouring out another generous glassful for himself. “There’s hundreds of no-good sailors like that. What did he tell you about your brother?”

“He caught me by surprise when he said, ‘Are ye Ely Morgan? Brother of Abraham Morgan?’”

“Go on,” said the Captain abruptly.

“He said he sailed with my brother and his friend John Taylor. They were two young pups, he said, as green as the first shoots of grass in April. They were sailing from Montevideo with a cargo of jerked beef when one of them hurricanes struck about four hundred miles south of Cuba. He told me it’s a wonder that the ship wasn’t dashed to pieces on some shore. Anyway, they put into Barbados, the crew all the time pumping and bailing. He said the ship was so badly damaged the captain dry-docked her, and after looking at the worm-eaten planking in the hull, sold her directly. The captain thought she was a cursed ship. Then he told me that the last he saw of Abraham and Taylor was the sight of them disappearing on a fast British ship. It looked as if they didn’t have much choice. A couple of the mates on board were beating on them with belaying pins and ropes.”

Foster piped in, interrupting Morgan. “Sounds like they were shanghaied by John Bull.”

Morgan nodded. “That’s what the old tar told me. He never laid eyes on my brother again, but he’d seen Taylor three years later in one of them grog shops on Cherry Street. He described him as a much-changed man, old beyond his young years. Said Taylor looked like he’d seen the Devil himself. He was fired up pretty well with the grog.”

Morgan had a rapt audience at this point, with Captain Foster and his men settling into the small cabin for a night of storytelling. The air was moldy and the wooden cabin sole was still wet from all the seawater that had poured in through the hatchway. They had no fire to warm themselves so the men kept passing the rum bottle.

“Did that old tar ask Taylor about your brother?” Foster inquired.

“He did,” Morgan replied. “He said he flat out asked Taylor whatever became of Abraham.”

“So . . .”

“Marshall told me that when he asked about Abraham, Taylor got all scared and shaky and started to whisper, ‘I ain’t supposed to tell, but I tell ye what, it was foul play of the worst kind, the Devil’s own mischief.’ Marshall said Taylor kept holding his hands over his ears and talking about the voices he was hearing, voices from hell he called them. He said something about how Jonah should have been cast forth into the sea.”

Morgan pulled his coat more tightly around him.

“Sadly, that’s all I know,” he said shaking his head despondently before continuing with his tale. “I know I need to find out more. Abraham would have wanted that. Whether my brother’s dead or alive, I need to get some answers. And if by some miracle he’s alive, I need to go find him and bring him back home.”

“Where you reckon you’re going to find him, boy? The world is a mighty big place.”

Morgan was silent. He looked down at his feet, and then his jaw tightened and his face took on a more determined look. “I don’t rightly know how I will find him, but make no mistake, I will. I got me a berth on a John Griswold ship going to London.”

The captain shook his head, spitting a squishy wad of tobacco out a porthole into the water. “Sounds like one of them new American ocean packet ships. You know about them packets, don’t you, boy?”

Morgan felt intimidated, but managed to stammer a response.

“They’re mail boats, ain’t they?”

“That’s right, but these new ships are full rigged with three masts. Square-riggers on a schedule, that’s what they call ’em. The Black Ball Line is sailing regular each month with fixed dates from New York to Liverpool these past few years. They’re carrying cargo and passengers as well as the mail. I seen the letter bags with the packet’s name on it hanging down by the Tontine Coffee House. No serious man of business is relying on those slow British brigs to deliver the mail anymore. The smart merchants are sending their packets of mail on ships flying the stars and stripes.”

Morgan had no idea about any of this, but he nodded knowingly.

The man paused and looked at him with a bemused expression on his face. “Speaking truthfully boy, if I was you, I’d turn around and go back where you come from. Your brother, he’s probably long ago dead. That’s just my cogitations, mind you. You rackety youngsters always do as you please.”

Morgan shook his head. “What if my brother is out there? He could still be alive. Maybe he’s hurt? Maybe a prisoner somewhere? Or he could be sick? Ain’t that right, Captain?”

The Block Island captain paused in thought as he ran a calloused hand through his bushy head of silver hair, then turned to Morgan with a smile. “You might be lucky, boy. Who knows? You might find that critter John Taylor down in them quim houses along Cherry Street in New York, or the alehouses on the East End of London. I venture to say sailors and sewer rats never stray too far from those two hellholes, no matter how much they roll and tumble around the world.”

After that bit of sage advice, the captain punctuated it with another stream of tobacco juice he squirted, into a spittoon this time. He then hitched up his pants and picked up the rum bottle, giving all hands another round. The next day, with the wind dead aft, the coastal schooner sailed with the tide into the East River. For Ely, who had only gone as far as New London and Hartford, the great booming port of New York was a wonder. The masts of ships were stacked up like a leafless forest. Hogsheads of sugar, chests of tea, and bales of cotton, wool, and merchandise were strewn all around the wharves. Swarthy stevedores pushed squeaky wheelbarrows loaded with outbound barrels of flour and corn. He could hear the shouts of wagon drivers blending in with the noisy clatter of horses’ hooves on cobblestones. He began to despair. How could he possibly hope to find any trace of John Taylor in the midst of all of this confusion?

At Peck’s Slip, Captain Foster hired two wharf rats for five cents each to help unload the cargo. Ely swung his duffel over his shoulder as he said good-bye to the captain and his crew and stepped ashore. When he looked back to wave, Foster gave him one last word of advice.

“Remember what I told you, son: life shipboard ain’t near as nice as what it looks like from shore.”

Nearby at the new fish market on Fulton Street, a vendor yelled at him: “Heh boy, you want a job scalin’ fish?”

Morgan looked at the grinning face of the grizzly fish salesman and then down at the scaly table filled with fish heads. Flies were buzzing around the vendor. The lifeless eyes of one large, dull, gray codfish seemed to be staring at him. The fetid smell of the old fish overwhelmed him and he gagged. He quickly turned away. His destination was 68 South Street, the new address of the offices of Griswold & Coates. There at the corner of Pine Street, he was to meet Captain Henry Champlin, his new employer. For one awful moment he wondered what would happen to him if Champlin wasn’t there. He had no place to go and only a quarter in his pocket. He put that unpleasant thought out of his mind. His eyes scanned the docks, gazing at the long line of ships with their graceful bowsprits pointed upward over the walkways. There were so many ships he couldn’t even count them.

He wondered if Abraham’s ship had docked here before it left for South America. He began to reminisce about his brother. The truth was he still missed him. They were five years apart, but unlike the other brothers, they had enjoyed a special friendship. Ely was small for his age, smart and quick with his studies, and the bigger boys at school had constantly picked on him. They pushed and shoved him and called him names. Feisty and strong willed, he’d return their taunts. It was Abraham who had always stepped in to protect him. In return, Ely had frequently helped his older brother with spelling and punctuation, which Abraham hated. But it was their mutual fascination with the sea and the oceangoing sailors that had bonded the two boys; that, and the harsh treatment they had both received from their father, had served to pull them together. They saw each other as kindred spirits with a shared destiny.